De gustibus non est disputandum.

Christmas morning found us at Russ & Daughters on Houston. You go there if you want pretty good bagels with awesome cream cheese (I recommend scallion cream cheese) plus the best lox on the planet. Their lox is fresh and custom cut for you on site. We tried the salmon belly lox. It was like eating sushi. Damn, now I’ll never be able to go back to the prepackaged lox they sell in supermarkets.
If you do go, I’d warn you not to go on a holiday like Christmas where it’s the only thing open for blocks. They use a ticket machine and we stood there for an hour suffering through their service process which likely hasn’t changed since their founding in 1914. Basically, each person behind the counter does everything for your order. He takes it, prepares it, deals with your culinary foibles and indecisions, and then he acts as the cashier. This soup to nuts approach leads to you getting what you want but has the undesirable side effect of requiring you to wait an hour for your turn.
Above, Russ in gold frame (I'm assuming) continues to oversee his operations from his golden framed throne. It's ingeniously tilted downward to convey the sense of him looming over you.

It would be much more efficient, according to A, if they were to apply specialization, like having a dedicated cashier which would free up more time for the people behind the counter to concentrate on taking and preparing orders. Building upon that, I offered up the idea of using dwarves or midgets because you could fit more of them behind the counter. So instead of 5 guys, you could have 10 or 12 dwarves. And monkeys. Each dwarf could have a monkey on his shoulder which could retrieve jars and bottles from the tall shelves.

In sum, if Russ & Daughters were to adopt the B&H model (plus monkeys), we wouldn’t have to wait so f’in long. However, it’s part of the “new york” experience I guess… i.e. any quality or hip locale means waiting and dealing with a flock of other hip to the beat hipsters because you’re in New York- so of course there’s a mob of over-educated hyper-informed hep cats dressed in black just like you who know where the good stuff is!